Posts by P. Lee

>So what crime did Assange commit that would require a pardon?

He embarrassed high-ranking American politicians.

Is there any reason to think that would not be perceived as an act of war and result in a spell in Gitmo?

Do the Swedes see how their extradition agreements are impacting their ability to execute justice? Regardless of what they say with their mouths, what do their actions say about their valuation of politics vs justice? We need to kill extradition treaties with most European countries. Let foreign governments come and plead their case under local law and bear the cost of the trial and possible punishment.

>Well, most people don't pay much attention to Wang these days. Upgrade to something else, then hang that out the window.

Hang out with Windows. Something exciting is bound to happen to you and "your" er, data.

Re: Oracle plus Cloud?!

This kind of reaction is what you get when your lock-in can generate price structures that are not warranted by your technology benefits.

Re: What a colossal waste of money!

You're missing the point.

Advertisers appear to spend on advertising for three reasons:

Big Brands:

Product positioning: it isn't an over-engineered, overpriced road-tractor, its an adventure lifestyle! It isn't an anti-social noise-generating device for distracting you from those around you, its a keep-you-connected-to-people mobile phone, entertainment centre and its all about YOU.

Excluding competitors: You don't want other companies appearing to be significant by being able to run saturation advertising campaigns (music shows, chewing gum, soft drinks, mobile phones, fried-food etc). The aim is to fill the mind of the advertised-to so that there is no room for other brands.

"Local" Brands:

Hello I'm here!: car/boat lots, mattress and tile outlets and family restaurants.

Most products are pretty generic, so there's little point giving out samples.

Re: "access to retained traffic and location data is extremely useful to the police"

>Convenience should be about the last criteria for any kind of mass surveillance law.*

But it is the first thing on the agenda for IT. It is a classic case of focusing on what is easy/measurable rather than what is hard/useful.

Re: On Ilkley Moor...

Is it not, "bar t' 'at" (bar thy hat) pronounced "bar t'at"? i.e. no ebay or (implied other) internet access.

Re: Not all of London has 'superfast' Broadband

>That's fine as long as you accept that it will mean upgrading significantly fewer properties.

I seem to recall Verizon saying fibre cuts its space and electricity costs so much it pays for itself. I can see digging trenches might be expensive, but what about those with telephone poles and wires above ground? Can you just wrap it around the existing copper?

Re: Interesting...

I think you're right. However, staking my privacy on the size of the buffer is not "secure by design." I wouldn't have one.

Of far more concern is the <INSERT COP SHOW NAME HERE> idea that if the police tell you its serious, its ok to break protocol. Protocol is specifically designed to ensure that that everyone does the right thing when emotions or other influences might be clouding the issue. If its serious, I'd suggest the police should stop acting like cowboys and do their job properly, so that Amazon and I are protected from the fallout from helping them. Why do the police keep doing this? Surely they know they are going to be rebuffed. Its so stupid and happens so often it seems more like a war of attrition, hoping that some day Amazon will break.

I doubt they are looking for voice data on whether Jeff ordered rope, quick-lime and concrete, though it is reasonable for the police to ask for data which may help them, even if its unlikely.

More likely, they aren't after Jeff's voice at all: "Amazon, Jeff stabbed me. Buy 2000 grand piano's on his credit card and have them delivered. Also, two cakes; one saying, 'I know what you did' and the other saying 'I'll be back.'"

It will be interesting to know what happens to the voice recordings in the long run.

Re: 4.7 Tb blobs .. over a 1g ethernet at best

"Yeah? Well I've got a thousand DVDs! Ner!", said the MS engineer as he picked up his ball.

Re: "Not enabled 2FA" ???? FFS ?

and what happens if you have a UC system?

You get unexpectedly single factored.

Re: Missing clause

>A company can decide not to sell you their product, but once they have sold you that product they cannot then retract that sale without a very good reason or with your consent.

Sure, if you *buy* the product. If you *license* the product then the license is generally based on some continuing agreement on both sides. Usually the terms of the agreement are stated upfront... "we can revoke it for any reasons at anytime without reimbursement" sounds like it would probably fail in court. I suspect they are banking on it being a trivial purchase that people will write off.

The root problem is the star-rating system. A few bad reviews even if they explain themselves and are obviously undeserved can ruin your business.

tl;dr: Internet-tethered (and especially mobile) commerce platforms and applications drive and allow anti-social behaviour.

Vaguely relevant but Obligatory xkcds:

https://xkcd.com/1098/

https://xkcd.com/937/

Re: That much for 3 yeard old data?

Paid for with proceeds from a 419 operation....

Re: Upon Opening:

Tis a Quagaar chairot!

Re: Where's my sabot?

Oh for a thou-au-au-au-au-sand upvotes to-oo give...

Just because the radiation probably doesn't destroy your braincells directly, does not mean that wifi (and indeed television) signals are not a major cause of diminished cognitive abilities and awful academic results.

The brain "prunes" unused bits of brain. If you don't use it, you do indeed, lose it.

Re: Since when cooking a Christmas Dinner is via a point and click interface?

If I point 'n' click at my Shel in an attempt to get Xmas dinner, I'd get a frownie-face exception error followed by mv dinner /dev/null; /bin/bash husband, kill -9 %1; cp patio husband

Or something like that.

Pointing and clicking only works when (IsOnFire? && IsOnTelephone?)

Re: Very interesting but not entirely surprising.

>It appears that MS are fully recompiling Win 10.

That's not even half the battle. How do you license something with very little utility (software) and with very little power, even if you could get the software? Will you end up with different prices depending on which ARM vendor you use? It would be a bit like having different Windows for celerons, i3s, i5s, i7s, xeons etc. How do you sell something which the vendor knows could easily operate below customer expectations?

>You are aware that data centres, no matter where they are located, require quite a lot of gear not made in the UK and mostly priced in, or at least with prices based on, USD, yes...?

I think the point is that the DC's are already up and running. Incremental costs do not justify the price hike across the board. E.g. getting UK engineers to service the DC just got cheaper, UK electricity just got cheaper. Imported stuff is not the only cost so even passing on the full cost increase wouldn't give you the full currency difference. All the income from non-UK accounts using UK DC facilities just got far more profitable... and yet, price gouging.... because we can.

Welcome to the Cloud. We own your data, we own your infrastructure. We own your business.

We also know that if you had a choice, you'd probably have already gone to AWS. So we're guessing there's an inelastic demand curve in play. Since the global economy has gone down the toilet, we haven't really added anything new and beneficial and we can't sell more stuff, we're going to have to hike prices to maintain our margins. That's not a long-run strategy, but I'm going to make sure I get my bonus.

If you own your own IT, you can sweat the assets in the hard times. The whole point of XaaS is to stop you doing that. Did you really build your business profitability on the basis of favourable exchange rates, did you? The price hike is bad enough, what happens if your supplier goes out of business? How long will it take you to find another supplier? Ah, you've tied your business to a single supplier with no hope of an alternative due to IP laws protecting the APIs? We're not just talking "unsupported" here, we're talking "gone." What if your supplier is Lehman Bros?

IT vendors have been vertically integrating because you can't trust third parties with your business. IT users need to learn the same lesson.

TL/DR; The economy is shot and the Emperor of Eternal Increases in Profitability has no clothes. Cut-price goods and services are usually shoddy value.

>Your "insider" speculates that a Clubcard breach is involved?

<massive speculation alert>

Maybe using the same purchase tracking system so they can "understand their customers better"?

It doesn't even need to be that system which was compromised, as soon as you start linking lots of IT systems between companies or company divisions, someone's bound to have some communication system with a flaw in it.

You've used a vpn? That's nice, now my attack is encrypted...

Re: Well...

>You can kiss the UK Software Industry good bye. Who would buy a software product from there now?

Anyone know who "an operator" is? Just the commercial ones such as telco's or is this down to individuals too?

It looks to me like a fairly logical extension of "give us your password or we'll throw you into gaol forever," to cover in-transit as well as at-rest data. Didn't MS get into trouble with the Belgians for not providing tapping capabilities to skype? Is anyone surprised its no longer p2p?

Re: AD for the home user?

I'll go out on a limb and suggest a windows (live?) account is probably AD - just not your AD.

MS, having gone for the slurp, has little incentive to let you (a consumer who doesn't spend) have your own infrastructure away from their prying eyes.

Re: Cart before the horse

>Apple did this twice

But they were going from slower to faster CPUs.

Going the other way is madness, doubling down on disappointment: first with a slower CPU and then with emulation.

If you want to run arm and x86 together, find some add arm to an x86 chip package and find some way to freeze/thaw data when you power each chipset on/off so you can share data quickly or not at all.

Re: Why is this still a problem?

>why do they still insist on having them hard coded?

Because these devices are install-and-forget and if you forget the password because the last time you accessed it was three years ago then you're going to need some comprehensive password reset plan which works with your crummy-little IoT hardware.

Easier and cheaper might be to set the TTL on all your telnet traffic to 1 by default. Setting the TTL to three or four is probably enough for most consumer kit to allow for VPN access. Having a physical switch which needs pushing to allow "advanced" access to change such things is probably enough to stop the botnets expanding. This isn't a perfect solution. It falls down if you are doing something dumb like attaching it to a cloud, but nobody's perfect! :)

Re: ksh or nothing, thank heavens for cygwin

>‘Why the hell a *shell* should do that?’

Because its interactive VisualBasic for Applications?

Ok, I'm talking well outside my skill-set here and I'm happy to be shot down for that comment, but there is a more interesting philosophical point in play.

I'm sure it will be great for manipulating MS applications & data. What happens with 3rd party apps? This is why *nix people like tools for handling "unstructured" text - it allows us to get at the data and do things the application writers never imagined, or more likely these days, what they did imagine but didn't want you to do.

I don't need application skills, I don't need api skills, just dump the data and I'll mess with it as required. Look at how MS use powershell - to create applications their own applications. If you don't go for the whole .net thing, you'll still need some alternative and perhaps other languages do that better.

We are basically heading to a situation where no-one trusts the ecosystem so everyone wants to own the whole stack. First they went to linux appliances, then they went to renting via SaaS. Given MS' keenness to kill on-site servers, I suspect powershell will become "Azure Powershell for MS applications" as everyone who is not Azure-only is unlikely to invest in these interfaces.

Re: What is LinkedIn hoping to gain?

It always amuses me that that customers "don't need to care about where the data is stored" for cloud purposes, but vendors seem incapable of managing their own cloud locations. Its cloud - its supposed to be all about modular, replicated architecture, automation and so on.

Of course, it could be that linkedin don't want to be liable to Mr Putin. The NSA generally keep their slurping quiet if they can, but I doubt Putin would be so careful. Being stuck with two competing, privacy-invading agencies might be more trouble than its worth.

Re: I'm in a similar dilemma with my 2008 unibody 13" MacBook 8GB ram 256GB SSD

>The blistering fast nvme ssd is a game changer. 3/2.7 GB Read/Write is unparalleled and mitigates future ram requirements as swapping ram to disk is so fast.

Sorry that's a rubbish idea because

1) Swap is a fudge, not an ideal to be aimed for. Using it on an SSD shortens its life (maybe that's the plan... /tinhat)

2) "Sorry we can't upgrade the RAM" is not a thing. Ok, it is a thing - its an Apple strategy thing, but it is not a technical thing.

Quite simply the "pro" is not a pros's machine, its a macbook up-sell for consumers who don't know any better.

For consumers, I doubt 16G RAM will be an issue for the lifetime of the machine. RAM requirements seem to be levelling out. I'm guessing the reason the RAM is not upgradable on the pro machine is that it would be embarrassing to have it non-upgradable on some machines but upgradable on others. I get that everyone has to make a profit, but this is not the way to do it. Apple is basically hoping that the rest of the industry follows suit so that it doesn't have to explain itself.

Magsafe data links might be technically tricky but the rest of it is well within their capabilities - they just chose not to do it. If Apple had left on a couple of USB2 ports, swappable battery, SSD and RAM and given us a new cable design for magsafe power with dual optical (or shielded electrical) thunderbolt3.1 links to the Apple version of the Razer Core with graphics and additional SSD slots, they would have made a lot of people very happy and people would be cooing over their "innovation."

If they had brought out a range of peripherals to take advantage of the high-speed ports, they would also have less flak. When they swapped floppy for usb drives, the actual USB drives were better. There's no apparent reason to have these new ports... except to sell more dongles so you can connect all the same kit you already have. If they had said, "Here's our new 10GbE Server/SSD RAID box. You can also get our 8/16-port 1GbE/10GbE switch that you can connect to the 10GbE link on your new pro." People would have said, "ok, its a pro box, I don't need it but I accept that its better than the old one and justifies the price hike."

I feel that consumer gear performance is probably impinging on business-system performance and the enterprise vendors don't want consumer pricing in their arenas. I'd love an 8-port switch which can take 10GbE or 1GbE SFPs. Thunderbolt interfaces can run at the right speeds, but no-one does the in-between bits to get to ethernet or the small switches. Everyone wants to do the 48-port version for $15k. Given that the complexity goes up exponentially, I would have thought a low port-count switch would have been a winner. We have PCIex16 slots going begging on most consumer desktops but where's the really high-speed networking and SSD arrays? No-one wants you to add another 256G SSD, they want you to throw out the old one and buy a new expensive 1TB one.

The problem is that my steam library is larger than many business databases and its very hard to segment the market when those who have a good reason to spend cash have the same requirements as those with no profit-motive for buying kit. This is why we are seeing a drop in innovation on the desktop. No-one wants to compromise their existing profit margins. And this is why we must tilt the playing field back towards companies who have nothing to lose and why IP laws (and the threat of IP litigation) have got to the point where they are damaging. If we stifle innovation via the law courts at home, the Chinese will do it and have the market to themselves. Sure, they'll be rubbish to start with - but so was the first iphone and so were Japanese goods in the 1970's.

Re: Sounds like she actually understands the issues

>Let's see if she can actually change their behavior

Or you can change your own behaviour by not putting your data on other people's servers.

Re: Cheaper to pay bug bounties...

>You design in the quality and security.

You need to design in the quality and security *into the OS*

Flash and the browser are software exposed to the internet taking in random data. This is a very high-risk activity zone. We know that and we *should* be in the position that, even when they have been compromised, no further damage can be done.

Browsers and other internet-facing features get updated all the time. We need to recognise there will be errors and plan for it by having better sandboxes. What's the minimum you need to get html rendered? Harden all those APIs. How about an automatic sudo to another user ID when you run a browser? How about a hardened API which allows file transfers between users, but only puts them into directory specified by the destination user's settings? (e.g. ~/downloads) and (if executable) marks the file as executable only from an interactive shell? OS's don't support that? Well, maybe its time for some new OS features.

Privacy is also now a problem. Who would trust Android, ChromeOS, iOS, MacOS or Windows not to upload their browser history to the mothership? What we want is to be able to download blacklists of the dodgy sites security wise to our local PCs, without uploading incriminating browser histories to the cloud. Without that assurance, its hard to protect users from themselves. While you might think people deserve what they get, but with DDOS attacks on the rise there's more at stake than someone getting crypto-lockered.

Security in depth please. What could possibly go wrong? Once you've answered that question, you have a roadmap for a response. Hint: patching is a tactical, not a strategic response.

Re: If you're good at your job then globalisation shouldn't pose a threat to you. Hah!

>That of course assumes your employer has a clue.

^ This.^

Outsourcing seems to be more about CV stuffing for those managers in charge of the change. "Look what I can manage!" before the hidden costs kick in.

>Because Licensing EACH CORE is awesome!

I have some sympathy with IBM's position. Would you rather have different sku's and buy a whole new unit to upgrade capacity? When you pay for the additional capacity, you get a discrete and definite benefit - more cpu capacity. That's what the consumer wants.

I have less sympathy with software vendors doing this. especially when its based on physical cores in the box, rather than limiting the number of cores the software will run on. With hardware, you know the benefit you'll be getting. With software, there's an incentive to make your software run badly to increase core-count revenue. That's bad for the consumer. This is why I have an issue with "Appliances" which are just PC's which the vendor refuses to upgrade or turns end-of-life with no good reason. That's server appliances or mobile phones - both are examples of hardware which is often dumbed down for market segmentation and (unlike IBM's hardware licensing). It's worse at the server end of the market: they want you to buy all new software licenses as well as over paying for new hardware.